#frictionlit #writing #contest #writingcontest #shortstory #sciencefiction #scifi Below is a story that I submitted to the “friction” literary magazine earlier this year. It's a beautiful magazine that is put out three times per year. Personally, I'm subscribed to it myself, otherwise I wouldn't have tried submitting a piece for their consideration. They hold a Spring and a Winter contest... The Winter deadline is still over a month away. We'll see how prolific I am in the next four weeks, maybe I'll have something that I think might fit the readership.

Getting back to this story though. This is one of the longer short stories that I've written, coming in around ~6k words. It's still considerably much smaller than a novella, but I've written it with the possibly expanding the story and the chapters more with additional prose in mind. So it is broken into ten “chapters” and an Epilogue.

The Pitch?

It's sort of like if Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had a baby with Total Recall. It's not quite as Philip K. Dick as I would like it to be, but I didn't think f®iction would want to publish hard pyschadelic sci-fi... Maybe I was wrong.

The story was rejected, but honestly, I would rather just post it as-is for people to read while I work on other stories. I would love to know your comments. What do you like? What do you hate? Any feedback is welcome.

#writing #fiction #shortstory #sciencefiction #scifi #competitions #flashfiction #microfiction #nycmidnight #nycmidnight250

Well, I didn't even get an honorable mention, but I'm grateful for the feedback they gave me!

However, I believe my friends and I re-worked the story to be far more compelling, and we did so before I got any official feedback. So, I'll break it down and talk about what I've learned through this experience. Also, below will be the revised story. I'm curious and eager to hear from all of you whether you think we were able to come up with a story that would have addressed the judges' criticisms before even knowing what those criticisms were?

#writing #fiction #sciencefiction #scifi #competitions #flashfiction #microfiction #nycmidnight #nycmidnight250

Not sure exactly when it was that I found out about the NYC Midnight writing competitions, must have been at least a few years ago now though. Probably around COVID, which would make sense because it's the type of thing that people were doing while they were locked in their homes... I'm also not sure what it is that brought me back to it this year. But I made the decision to finally pony up the entry fee and actually get serious about it.